On Losing Bob Smith
Bob [Smith], who broke ground as the first openly gay comedian to appear on The Tonight Show, passed away on January 20th after a long battle with ALS.
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How to Be a Porn Star
It is impossible to read A Pornographer without being aware of the era in which it
was written: the Me Decade. Gay liberation was underway, there was no such thing as AIDS, and homosexuals in cities like New York were aware that they were creating new forms of affective linkage—couples who allowed each other secondary boyfriends, people who could have sex with strangers with no consequences, having learned famously to separate “sex and sentiment.”
Squaring the Disability
For everyone, life itself is full of complexity. For LGBT people who are disabled, that complexity is multiplied. For most people, enjoying their sexuality is vital to happiness, so it is vital that therapeutic workers, and society at large, adequately address the special needs, including the sexual ones, of LGBT people.
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Belated Vindication for John Boswell
IN HIS 1995 BOOK The Marriage of Likeness: Same-sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe, John Boswell argued that in medieval Europe unions between same-sex couples were acceptable under certain circumstances…More
David Hockney’s Great Yes to Life
DAVID HOCKNEY: An Exhibitionis a global event, and it is the most comprehensive retrospective ever devoted to the eighty-year-old artist’s career. The exhibition is mounted on a grand scale, with more than 250 pieces, ranging from his early sketches made in the 1960s through video installations constructed in 2015.
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Of Maine, Men, and Marsden Hartley
ONE OF THE BEST-KNOWN images of Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) comes to us through the lens of the great gay photographer George Platt Lynes in a photograph from 1943, shortly before Hartley’s death. Hartley slumps in a chair, his body casting massive shadows under the influence of Lynes’ harsh lighting.
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A Certain Gorgeous Bleakness
The influence of Bonnard can also be seen in Steers’ color palette, in the intermixing and soft suffusion of pale yellow, green, and violet tones on the windowsill, tub, and tiled floor. Yet there is a key difference. Bonnard’s female figures blend in with the walls and the other objects in the picture, as seen in Large Nude, while in Steers’ Bath Curtain, the harsh, hot, orange-red and brown flesh tones of the bent figure’s back are in opposition to the low-key colors of the surroundings.
MoreAn Anti-LGBT Bill Moves through Congress
SEN. MIKE LEE (R-Utah) has reintroduced legislation in the U.S. Senate seen to enable anti-LGBT discrimination in the name of “religious freedom”—and Donald Trump made signing such legislation a campaign promise.
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Readers’ thoughts.
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When Women Rise
THIS BOOK packs a punch—or rather, multiple punches—reflecting the power and energy of women’s struggles for political and social equality in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.
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